Training week and Ciudad de los Ninos, Lima

Got back off our training week a couple of days ago, which was ace! Met all the Peru girls, and a few others, and they're all lovely! It was just rammed with lessons on spotting abuse, running a club, bereavement, child to child, politics, sex, drugs and alcohol, what to do if there's a natural disaster etc. We had some time to chill out a bit in the evenings and get to know the rest of the volunteers as well- Evie, Shannon, Kirsty, Harriet, Rosanna,  Alex, Aneesha, Emily, Louise, Frances and Wendy are the Peru girls and Alex, Jack and Helen are going to Bolivia. Also, got our dates for leaving - we fly out on the 26th of August, which is about 40 days away now!

Our new project is called Ciudad de los Ninos and is in San Juan de Miraflores, Lima. It's an all boys orphanage and is broken up into houses based on the kids' age i.e. 3-6 year olds, and we'll each be assigned to a house. We'll work 6 days a week starting at 6am to get the boys up, fed and to school and ends around 8/9pm, but we should get some breaks inbetween. It's run by Capuchin monks and nuns and the kids are all very religious, which will be interesting. We'll get paid around 200 soles a month for our work a month and live in an apartment (with a shower and flushing toilet!). We get two months holiday from December - mid Feb while the boys are off school when we can travel, which I'm really looking forward to! I'm feeling a lot better about the new project now we've got more information about it and actually can't wait to go! Just got some (a lot of) last minute things to sort out now before we go away!

Adios amigos,
Moffy xxx

Original project's fallen through

Unfortunately, I got a phone call last night saying that the Arequipa project has fallen through. Apparently the orphanage is prioritising spending money on construction rather than funding overseas volunteers. I'm pretty gutted because I was really looking forward to the Arequipa project but on the bright side, Project Trust have managed find us another project in Peru! It’s in Lima this time, the country’s capital, and it’s much more central so travelling will be made easier. The orphanage holds 300 kids, and they’re all boys! It was only a brief phone call so I didn’t get much information, but I also found out its run by monks and they go to church twice a day, which will be new as I'm not even slightly religious. It's all a bit confusing at the moment because it's a new project and only started in March '11 so PT don't know too much about it and the current volunteers haven't heard anything about construction so we'll just have to see what happens. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to get some more detailed information this weekend at our training. I’m still really excited about going to Peru; it’s just something slightly different to be excited about. Really excited about training as well and meeting the other volunteers going to Peru!

Moffy xxx